Today in History, TV10 is walking you a 23 year down memory lane and that is January 11 marking 23 years since the opening of Guantanamo Bay, the infamous US prison located in Cuba that critics say allows detainees to be held indefinitely outside of normal laws or judicial oversight.
A product of the so-called “war on terror”, US President Joe Biden, like his predecessor Barack Obama, had said he wanted to close the facility. Instead, it was expanded under Biden administration with a new $4m courtroom.
During the past two decades, 780 men have passed through the facility, which was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Today, the facility holds 39 men, according to disclosures from the US government’s interagency Periodic Review Board made in 2022 October.
“These are detentions that are inescapably bound up with multiple layers of unlawful government conduct over the years – secret transfers, incommunicado interrogations, forced feeding of hunger strikers, torture, enforced disappearance, and a complete lack of due process,” said Amnesty International’s Daphne Eviatar in a statement.
TV10 looks back at some key events over 23 years of controversy surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.
November 13, 2001: George W Bush, the US president, issues a military order on the “Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens, in the War Against Terrorism”. The order authorises the US to hold foreign nationals in custody without charge indefinitely, and prevents them from undertaking any legal process to challenge their detention.
December 28, 2001: A memorandum from the US Justice Department to the Pentagon explains that prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay are not eligible for habeas corpus rights protecting against arbitrary detention because they are not on US soil.
January 11, 2002: The first 20 detainees arrive at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray and are held outdoors in wire mesh cages.
